Few bands of the past decade can boast the same kind of meteoric and somewhat bewildering rise to fame as that of Vampire Weekend. Even before the NYC-based band had released a full-length album, blogs and music magazines were nearly besides themselves with excitement. The story was simple--a bunch of smarty pants kids from Columbia University were basically making the greatest indie-pop music the world might ever know (or something like that) and they were either embracing or ripping off African music in the process. When Vampire Weekend was released in early 2008, the buzz grew even louder. The band graced magazine covers, played Saturday Night Live, and performed on some of the world's most prestigious stages. Now, just two years later, the band returns with Contra--a record every bit as charming and effusive as it's predecessor. At a time when many bands in their position might be suffering the slings and arrows of being a buzz band that got too famous too fast, the guys in Vampire Weekend are taking it all in stride.
I spoke to frontman Ezra Koenig about how things have changed for the band now that the world is apparently theirs for the taking.
How does it feel to be back on the press/touring juggernaut? It doesn't really seem like you guys had much of a break since the last record.
We've been at it for a while now, already doing press in several different countries. I feel like there's been so much buildup for this new record, even just for us as a band, that I feel like it will be a relief--and a nice change of pace--for the record to finally be out and for us to be playing shows again.
How long did you tour for the last record? It seems like you guys were on the road forever.
We basically toured for a year and a half, but that doesn't include all the touring that we'd done before the record even came out. As soon as we got home from all that touring, we immediately started working on this new record. There really wasn't a break.
Everyone always talks about the classic sophomore slump and how hard it often is to follow up such a widely-praised and highly successful debut album. How difficult was that for you guys?
Personally I found both records equally difficult to make. The fact that more people had heard of us this time didn't really change things all that much. We've always pretty much done everything ourselves, so we've always had a pretty set way of working, so it's easy to revisit that. Anytime you are tying to make something as good as you can and you are trying to get across your ideas, there is going to be some small amount of stress. I don't think the outside pressure really bothered us all that much.
The record feels like a very assured step in the right direction without sacrificing any of the aesthetic that made people like you so much in the first place. That's a hard trick to pull off.
We knew that we were incapable of reproducing the first record and that we could not necessarily expect the same kind of reaction from it. We just wanted to make something good that also made sense to us.
No one can ever be prepared or know exactly what to expect when you put out a record, but the success of Vampire Weekend must have been bewildering to say the very least.
It certainly exceeded our expectations. Things had been going pretty well leading up to the release of that record, but once the record was actually out things changed pretty quickly for us. Playing festivals for the first time, watching the venues get bigger and bigger and bigger. I certainly didn't expect it.
I think it's fair to say that there are plenty of people who were gunning for you guys by the time this new album was released. That kind of success always creates some inevitable backlash. Still, I was surprised how little of that I heard when Contra finally arrived. Responses have been very positive and much less snarky and mean that I would have expected…at least from some people.
I think that people who really understand our band will also understand this record. Just like with any band that experiences some degree of success, there are always gonna be people gunning for you. It's never entirely pleasant, but at least you can kind of get used to it. It's never as simple as you put out a first record and everyone loves you, then you put out a second record and everyone hates you. In the age that we live in now, pretty much from the outset there will be people who love you and a very vocal minority of people who hate you….and then that just continues to happen from then on. You grow accustomed to it. We were also pleasantly surprised that Contra didn't leak before the release, so it felt like most people got to hear it at basically the exact same time. We'd been playing some of those songs live for years, so we'd already gotten some response from friends on fans about some of the songs.
You guys experienced a very interesting kind of backlash early on in your career. Even before your first record had come out, there was already this dialogue about the validity of your music. So much of the criticism had nothing to do with the music itself but was--and still is--based in a larger cultural context. There was always this idea that you are referencing other kinds of music that you somehow don't have a right to be referencing. It's a fairly heady criticism to lay on an indie rock band and one that I assume must have been tiresome to constantly talk about.
It can be tiresome. You know, we're obvious the type of people who enjoy talking about things like cultural history and where things come from and exploring different kinds of cultural connections. But, when you constantly have to defend yourself, it stops being some fascinating conversation about authenticity or ownership. It just becomes a lot of yelling. Having done lots of interviews over the past two years you find that there are people who approach that topic with a certain amount of genuine curiosity and want to really dissect it…and then you experience those people who are just really angry and looking for the easiest way to express that. I think there are a lot of people who, for whatever reason, have a problem with Vampire Weekend and choose to express that by suddenly pretending to be an expert on African music and/or cultural criticism. People latch on to one specific aspect of the band--one specific reference we might have made--and run wild with it. But you know, maybe that's a good thing. I guess it's better to inspire some kind of discussion rather than none at all.
It's weird to me, this notion that you really have to be of a certain age or a certain race in order to authentically reference a certain kind of music. Since kids now have grown up with the internet--and are so easily exposed to so many different kinds of music and have easy access so many different forms of music--it makes sense that bands should be drawing from a much deeper cultural repertoire than they used to be.
It's true. The whole thing is a joke, really. People often manufacture this phony rage about it. I think it's important to identify exploitation and inauthenticity when it's there, but you are doing a disservice to everyone when you pretend that it exists in places that it truly doesn't. At the end of the day, things are much more complicated than they appear. We've said it before, but in our band the two primary songwriters--Rostom and myself--are of Persian and Jewish ancestry. These are two groups of people whose very whiteness has been questioned at times, two groups of people whose musical history is not solely western. It makes you realize that we could probably make some very Middle-Eastern sounding music and explain it by saying that we are exploring our own musical heritage…or we can simply say that we are people who grew up in America and had access to all different kinds of music. It makes you realize that the whole authenticity game is usually one being played by insecure critics and not actual musicians. If you love making music, you find a way to express that by also paying homage to the music that you love.
It reminds me of a time in my life when I was teaching poetry classes. I'd often tell people that the best way to learn how to write poetry is to simply read as much poetry as possible. Eventually, after being exposed to something long enough, those very same forms will often start to come out of you…and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Working within a style that you admire or embracing a certain set of influences is not the same thing as plagiarism.
Exactly. People would often accuse our song "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" of being ripped off entirely from a Congolese record or that the riff is not original. You can certainly hear certain references in that song, but at the end of the day it is its own thing.
Absolute originality is a hard standard to try and uphold in the year 2010. At this point, everything is basically a reference to something else. When it came to making this record, were there certain things you absolutely wanted to do differently?
We didn't have such rigid rules. Not that we had such rigid rules the first time around, but on the first record we really stuck to really guitar songs, which became one of the hallmarks of that album. This time were weren't so afraid of weird guitar sounds. We really wanted to follow our interests and let that lead us. I think that allowed us to be true to the songs.
This record strikes me as being much more personal than the previous one. Is that a fair assessment?
Hmm. I'd say that this is a much more obviously emotional record than the previous one. I don't necessarily means that it's more personal. It's hard to say. Sometimes the lyrics that make the least amount of sense to other people are the ones that make the most sense to me. I think that's the nature and the beauty of song lyrics--they should be somewhat abstract. You never know how people are going to interpret things. You know, our perspective on things has definitely changed. We're all a few years older. We're definitely not college students anymore. I would hope that is somehow reflected in the music. Our songs are never really these fantastical or psychedelic flights of fancy. Even the ones that people typically think are really weird are somehow rooted in real experiences.
How much did the success of the first record radically change your lives? It must be disorienting…and a strain on being able to maintain somewhat normal relationships with people.
Well, living in New York kind of makes it easier. You come home and just go immediately back to doing your own thing like always. And it's not like people are recognizing me on the street or anything. I think we are lucky that so many people have now heard of Vampire Weekend, but the only people who are gonna stop and talk to us on the street are generally people who actually have something to say or just really love the band. I find that being at home is when things feel the most normal and it feels like very little has changed. We still hang out with the same people and do the same things we always did. I guess the main difference is when I think about the experience of making the first record versus the experience of making the new one. When we were making the first record we were recording in Rostom and Chris' apartment, usually at night after we got off of work, and then taking the bus back home late at night. Now, music is a full-time job. We have tried to apply the same work ethic. The only change is really that the shows get bigger. We try to take it al with a grain of salt, you know? Having already exceeded our most ambitious goals, anything that happens now is just a wonderful bonus. Success is certainly not our god given right. We appreciate it very much.
-T. Cole Rachel
Contra is out now on XL Records
Buy it on iTunes
Vampire Weekend's OFFICIAL WEBSITE
Vampire Weekend on MYSPACE
I spoke to frontman Ezra Koenig about how things have changed for the band now that the world is apparently theirs for the taking.
How does it feel to be back on the press/touring juggernaut? It doesn't really seem like you guys had much of a break since the last record.
We've been at it for a while now, already doing press in several different countries. I feel like there's been so much buildup for this new record, even just for us as a band, that I feel like it will be a relief--and a nice change of pace--for the record to finally be out and for us to be playing shows again.
How long did you tour for the last record? It seems like you guys were on the road forever.
We basically toured for a year and a half, but that doesn't include all the touring that we'd done before the record even came out. As soon as we got home from all that touring, we immediately started working on this new record. There really wasn't a break.
Everyone always talks about the classic sophomore slump and how hard it often is to follow up such a widely-praised and highly successful debut album. How difficult was that for you guys?
Personally I found both records equally difficult to make. The fact that more people had heard of us this time didn't really change things all that much. We've always pretty much done everything ourselves, so we've always had a pretty set way of working, so it's easy to revisit that. Anytime you are tying to make something as good as you can and you are trying to get across your ideas, there is going to be some small amount of stress. I don't think the outside pressure really bothered us all that much.
The record feels like a very assured step in the right direction without sacrificing any of the aesthetic that made people like you so much in the first place. That's a hard trick to pull off.
We knew that we were incapable of reproducing the first record and that we could not necessarily expect the same kind of reaction from it. We just wanted to make something good that also made sense to us.
No one can ever be prepared or know exactly what to expect when you put out a record, but the success of Vampire Weekend must have been bewildering to say the very least.
It certainly exceeded our expectations. Things had been going pretty well leading up to the release of that record, but once the record was actually out things changed pretty quickly for us. Playing festivals for the first time, watching the venues get bigger and bigger and bigger. I certainly didn't expect it.
I think it's fair to say that there are plenty of people who were gunning for you guys by the time this new album was released. That kind of success always creates some inevitable backlash. Still, I was surprised how little of that I heard when Contra finally arrived. Responses have been very positive and much less snarky and mean that I would have expected…at least from some people.
I think that people who really understand our band will also understand this record. Just like with any band that experiences some degree of success, there are always gonna be people gunning for you. It's never entirely pleasant, but at least you can kind of get used to it. It's never as simple as you put out a first record and everyone loves you, then you put out a second record and everyone hates you. In the age that we live in now, pretty much from the outset there will be people who love you and a very vocal minority of people who hate you….and then that just continues to happen from then on. You grow accustomed to it. We were also pleasantly surprised that Contra didn't leak before the release, so it felt like most people got to hear it at basically the exact same time. We'd been playing some of those songs live for years, so we'd already gotten some response from friends on fans about some of the songs.
You guys experienced a very interesting kind of backlash early on in your career. Even before your first record had come out, there was already this dialogue about the validity of your music. So much of the criticism had nothing to do with the music itself but was--and still is--based in a larger cultural context. There was always this idea that you are referencing other kinds of music that you somehow don't have a right to be referencing. It's a fairly heady criticism to lay on an indie rock band and one that I assume must have been tiresome to constantly talk about.
It can be tiresome. You know, we're obvious the type of people who enjoy talking about things like cultural history and where things come from and exploring different kinds of cultural connections. But, when you constantly have to defend yourself, it stops being some fascinating conversation about authenticity or ownership. It just becomes a lot of yelling. Having done lots of interviews over the past two years you find that there are people who approach that topic with a certain amount of genuine curiosity and want to really dissect it…and then you experience those people who are just really angry and looking for the easiest way to express that. I think there are a lot of people who, for whatever reason, have a problem with Vampire Weekend and choose to express that by suddenly pretending to be an expert on African music and/or cultural criticism. People latch on to one specific aspect of the band--one specific reference we might have made--and run wild with it. But you know, maybe that's a good thing. I guess it's better to inspire some kind of discussion rather than none at all.
It's weird to me, this notion that you really have to be of a certain age or a certain race in order to authentically reference a certain kind of music. Since kids now have grown up with the internet--and are so easily exposed to so many different kinds of music and have easy access so many different forms of music--it makes sense that bands should be drawing from a much deeper cultural repertoire than they used to be.
It's true. The whole thing is a joke, really. People often manufacture this phony rage about it. I think it's important to identify exploitation and inauthenticity when it's there, but you are doing a disservice to everyone when you pretend that it exists in places that it truly doesn't. At the end of the day, things are much more complicated than they appear. We've said it before, but in our band the two primary songwriters--Rostom and myself--are of Persian and Jewish ancestry. These are two groups of people whose very whiteness has been questioned at times, two groups of people whose musical history is not solely western. It makes you realize that we could probably make some very Middle-Eastern sounding music and explain it by saying that we are exploring our own musical heritage…or we can simply say that we are people who grew up in America and had access to all different kinds of music. It makes you realize that the whole authenticity game is usually one being played by insecure critics and not actual musicians. If you love making music, you find a way to express that by also paying homage to the music that you love.
It reminds me of a time in my life when I was teaching poetry classes. I'd often tell people that the best way to learn how to write poetry is to simply read as much poetry as possible. Eventually, after being exposed to something long enough, those very same forms will often start to come out of you…and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Working within a style that you admire or embracing a certain set of influences is not the same thing as plagiarism.
Exactly. People would often accuse our song "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" of being ripped off entirely from a Congolese record or that the riff is not original. You can certainly hear certain references in that song, but at the end of the day it is its own thing.
Absolute originality is a hard standard to try and uphold in the year 2010. At this point, everything is basically a reference to something else. When it came to making this record, were there certain things you absolutely wanted to do differently?
We didn't have such rigid rules. Not that we had such rigid rules the first time around, but on the first record we really stuck to really guitar songs, which became one of the hallmarks of that album. This time were weren't so afraid of weird guitar sounds. We really wanted to follow our interests and let that lead us. I think that allowed us to be true to the songs.
This record strikes me as being much more personal than the previous one. Is that a fair assessment?
Hmm. I'd say that this is a much more obviously emotional record than the previous one. I don't necessarily means that it's more personal. It's hard to say. Sometimes the lyrics that make the least amount of sense to other people are the ones that make the most sense to me. I think that's the nature and the beauty of song lyrics--they should be somewhat abstract. You never know how people are going to interpret things. You know, our perspective on things has definitely changed. We're all a few years older. We're definitely not college students anymore. I would hope that is somehow reflected in the music. Our songs are never really these fantastical or psychedelic flights of fancy. Even the ones that people typically think are really weird are somehow rooted in real experiences.
How much did the success of the first record radically change your lives? It must be disorienting…and a strain on being able to maintain somewhat normal relationships with people.
Well, living in New York kind of makes it easier. You come home and just go immediately back to doing your own thing like always. And it's not like people are recognizing me on the street or anything. I think we are lucky that so many people have now heard of Vampire Weekend, but the only people who are gonna stop and talk to us on the street are generally people who actually have something to say or just really love the band. I find that being at home is when things feel the most normal and it feels like very little has changed. We still hang out with the same people and do the same things we always did. I guess the main difference is when I think about the experience of making the first record versus the experience of making the new one. When we were making the first record we were recording in Rostom and Chris' apartment, usually at night after we got off of work, and then taking the bus back home late at night. Now, music is a full-time job. We have tried to apply the same work ethic. The only change is really that the shows get bigger. We try to take it al with a grain of salt, you know? Having already exceeded our most ambitious goals, anything that happens now is just a wonderful bonus. Success is certainly not our god given right. We appreciate it very much.
-T. Cole Rachel
Contra is out now on XL Records
Buy it on iTunes
Vampire Weekend's OFFICIAL WEBSITE
Vampire Weekend on MYSPACE
